Yick. So that's how the upper 15 or 20 percent live and eat. And the admiration shown a person because he owns a sports team, or because she owns a bookstore (as a hobby, presumably, certainly not for the money), is pathetic. But thanks for the article, now I know not to bother looking into Bauer's novels.

I don't like this woman. A natural cynic, she is over her head, so she resents the subject she writes about. She admits to knowing nothing about cooking (it's unsurprising that her reviews are bubbly nonsense), but suddenly she is ascribing to restaurants, their customers, and their reviewers all the repressed angst of her own unfulfilled life.

Certainly there is a wealthy sub-culture that fetishifies food, but good food writers (like Tony Bourdain, John Thorne, James Villas, and Michael Ruhlman) know enough about their topic to expand it to include a vast array of human experience. Food is a universal experience, so it is a natural entree to life.

Finally, I'm getting tired of the ubiquitous porn-bashing. Erotic writing is as ancient as civilization, and Salon's obsession with it (and clear disapproval) is a mark of our repressed puritanical society. Come on, editors! Get a life. Read Susie Bright (indeed, why not publish Susie Bright?), and learn to embrace sensuality. But stop this furtive smirking. It puts you in bed with the same people who want to repress all progressive thought.

Gawd, I was so sad to learn that Pinot Noir is now passe`. It's been my favorite California wine for almost fifteen years. (Long before Sideways came along obviously.) And now I have to give up my Russian River Pinots because it's no longer fashionable to drink them?

I can't read food & wine reviews anymore, or for that matter articles like this one because it's taking all the fun out of being a food lover. It's hard enough keeping up with the kind of jeans I should be wearing and now I have to worry about my wine too?

Could someone please tell me what this season's fashionable wine is so I don't look foolish ordering Pinot Noir tonight.

What a couple of perfectly beastly years dear Ann has endured as a food critic. A talented writer, rising above her station, to turn a buck as a high kitchen Klute. In her workplace, all the poor lass wanted was a warm, fuzzy zaftig. She wound a hostage to a posse of poseurs, her jaded palate and silken prose ultimately yielding to the economic imperatives of her magazine.

I did, however, enjoy Ann Bauer's essay, registering many smiles and the odd chuckle. A one-time Parisian plongeur, George Orwell, provided contrasting insights into the world of the dining experience. And he managed it all without wearing a wrist watch to work.

As the saying goes: to a man with a hammer every problem looks like a nail, so too our anguished, precious, moderns: in every article they read they hear an echo of their own issues and grievances. The article was well written, insightful, acutely observed, and funny! Thank you.

Most of us do jobs that sooner or later become boring or repetitive or loathsome, but we have to make a living, so we make do until something better comes along, or we retire, or sometimes we die first.

Reviewing anything is one of those jobs that tends to go that way. I should imagine that if I were a television reviewer, I would soon be physically sick at the sight of a TV, and certainly would not want one in my house.

More than 60 years ago, George Orwell discovered the same things about reviewing books for a living, and in an essay called Confessions of a Book Reviewer he wrote:

"...the prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash--though it does involve that, as I will show in a moment--but constantly INVENTING reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever..."

"...It is almost impossible to mention books in bulk without grossly overpraising the great majority of them. Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be "This book is worthless", while the truth about the reviewer's own reaction would probably be "This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to." But the public will not pay to read that kind of thing. Why should they?"

So, yes, our restaurant reviewer has discovered that what some people might imagine to be exciting and glamorous turns out to be drudgery when you have to do it all the time. Possibly this is why prostitutes don't always go to work with a spring in their step--as the author suggests.

OK, its not very profound, and it is not very novel, but this article provokes a little discussion and puts bread on the author's table, and if we weren't reading this, we would be reading something else of no greater merit.

Actually I would like to see more articles about people's work a la Barbara Ehrenreich, but for obvious reasons most of the articles we see where people write about their own work are written by professional writers. They don't have to take time off work to write, you see.

For an integrated and holistic approach to food and eating, check out Deborah Kesten's excellent article "The Enlightened Diet" from Spirituality & Health magazine:

http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/NMagazine/articles.php?id=531

(free registration required)

an excerpt:

"Not only do virtually all religions and cultural traditions encourage cooking with love, they also seem to integrate intuitively and instinctively what modern researchers are beginning to conjecture: that food empowers us to heal multidimensionally. In other words, we may use our incredible human consciousness and food in four ways: to prevent or reverse physical ailments (biological nutrition); experience the food-mood connection (psychological nutrition); reunite with the spiritual meaning of food (spiritual nutrition); and return to our "social nutrition" heritage (social nutrition). Recognizing all four facets of food allows us to pay attention to the connections between food and body, food and mind, food and soul, and food and social well-being. When we do, we gain a new focus for optimal dietary self-care, which I describe as integrative nutrition."